Hueber [Hüber], Martin.

SeeVetter, Conrad.

Hue de la Ferté

(fl 1220–35). French trouvère. A supporter of Pierre de Dreux, dit Mauclerc, Duke of Brittany, Hue attacked the legitimacy of the regency of Queen Blanche of Castile, the widow of Louis VIII, in three bitter political serventois. These complain of the queen’s neglect of French interests in favour of foreign ones, and single out Thibaut IV of Champagne as unworthy. En talent ai que je die is set to a simple tune with the form ABABCDD1D2.

Hueffer, Francis [Hüffer, Franz (Xaver)]

(b Münster, 22 May 1845; d London, 19 Jan 1889). English author and music critic of German birth. A pupil of Schopenhauer, he studied philology and music in London, Paris, Berlin and Leipzig, gaining his doctorate at Göttingen for a critical study of the troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh (1869). As a free-thinker, an agnostic and an enthusiast for the avant garde, he became distanced from his prosperous Catholic family. Sharing Schopenhauer’s anglophilia, in 1869, with events moving towards the Franco-Prussian war, Hueffer moved to London, where he quickly made several important acquaintances in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. He began writing for the North British Review, the Fortnightly Review, The Academy (of which he was assistant editor) and the Musical World (which he also edited). He was music critic of The Times, 1878–89, and for some time the London correspondent for Le ménestral, Die Frankfurter Zeitung and the Italian Tribuna. In 1878 he published The Troubadours, a history of medieval Provençal life and literature, on which he lectured to the Royal Institution in 1880. His interest in Provençal studies led to his election to the Félibrige, the association of Provençal poets (among whom Mistral was prominent) which had been founded in 1854. He edited the earlier volumes in the Great Musicians series of composers’ lives, initiating it with his own Richard Wagner (1881). He also wrote the librettos of Colomba and The Troubadour (originally entitled Guillem le troubadour and based on Cabestanh) for Mackenzie and of The Sleeping Beauty for Cowen, and made an adaptation of Verdi’s Otello using as much as possible of Shakespeare’s original. In 1872 he married Catherine, daughter of the artist Ford Madox Brown. Their son, the novelist Ford Madox Ford, left reminiscences of his father scattered through his quasi-fictional memoirs. Hueffer became a British citizen in 1882.

Hueffer was, with Dannreuther, one of the first critics to draw English attention to Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz, and his first book on Wagner (1874), reprinted from the Fortnightly Review, was one of the pioneering attempts, before the first Bayreuth Festival, to declare the nature of Wagner’s genius in England. He followed this study of Wagner’s artistic principles with a more popular life of Wagner designed to arouse wider interest, and with a translation of the Wagner-Liszt correspondence (1888/R) that very serviceably reproduces Wagner’s prose on the many occasions when, as Hueffer wryly observed, ‘his pen courses over the paper with the swiftness and recklessness of a racehorse, regardless of the obstacles of style and construction, and sometimes of grammar’. On Berlioz and Liszt he was respectful but more guarded. His Half a Century of Music in England, 1837–1887 significantly dates the revival of music from Queen Victoria’s accession: Hueffer was an essential Victorian, and regarded the queen as having personally reversed the Hanoverian discouragement of music by patronizing Mendelssohn and Liszt, and her reign as having seen the establishment of music as an English national art.

Hueffer personified the move in music criticism to a more self-consciously intellectual level, basing his ideas of those of Schopenhauer, of whom he was an ardent disciple. His belief in a common Western musical culture and philosophy, rising above national rivalries, was progressive in comparison with the conservatism of British music critics before Shaw. He also composed piano music and some songs, a few of which were published in London.